Tuesday, August 31, 2010

A couple of bloggers I follow posted some thing about "beating the game" yesterday. I don't make a habit of playing games, let alone beating them, and I didn't see any keywords that grabbed my attention, so I scrolled by after a brief pause.

That's important to understand: most of the items I "read" are glances at the headline and the first few lines or sentences to quickly decide whether I want to spend the time to read the whole thing. This is especially true for RSS feeds that provide only a title and a teaser: if you want me to read your stuff, and you expect me to click over to your website to do so-especially websites loaded with ads and sidebar add-ons- try to give me some idea what the fuck I'm going to see when I do. I've been getting really frustrated with this, and I've been dropping feeds that are the worst about it.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the number of RSS items I "read" (I think of it as "sort through") in a typical day has increased by about 25% over the last few months. Last spring I was averaging a bit over 1000 per day. Now...See why I tend to put off time-consuming posts for the weekends?

Then I found the relevant article in my "Google-related" folder, and given that I started using Google Reader well over a year ago, I guess I've beaten the game too:

Eagle-eyed viewers might have also noticed we've added a new category to the trends page: clicked trends - now you can see which sources you click on the most.And finally, something many of you have asked for before...we now show you your lifetime read item count. That's right. Every. Single.* Item.**

*Only things you've scrolled by, or clicked on - doesn't count mark all as read.**Okay, that's not quite accurate - once you hit around 300K (which we know some of you are already over) we stop counting for performance reasons. Consider that "beating the game".